Facebook Offering Businesses $500 to Monitor Their Phone Calls

I just received an email from Facebook offering one of my social media clients a $500 advertising coupon if he agrees to participate in Facebook’s Call Tracking Study.

The goal of the month-long study is “to understand how many phone calls local businesses receive as a result of their Facebook Page.”

What facebook wants my client to do is replace the phone number on their Facebook fanpage with the special Facebook issued tracking number. Calls to the number will still be routed to my client’s business. Facebook claims they are just “monitoring usage”. According to their website, “Facebook will primarily log the number of phone calls made from the special number on your page. We will not record or listen to your calls.”

Unfortunately the study is only open to a small group of businesses who have been invited to participate. No information was given as to what the criteria were for selecting my client’s business.

You can learn more about Facebook’s Call Tracking Study on their website.

Would you route your business phone calls through facebook and let them monitor them? I guess it depends on how many calls you receive from your facebook page. Maybe you should conduct a research study to find out.

Social Media vs Your Website

I found an interesting article tonight about the rising popularity of social media as compared with traditional websites. According to the Wall Street Journal, some large companies such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola receive up to 20 times as much traffic to their facebook pages as to their corporate websites.

I knew companies were increasingly utilizing social media websites such as facebook and twitter to connect with customers. I had no idea that in some cases these social media sites were outperforming these companies corporate websites… and to such an extent. I suppose it depends on the product, brand or service. In Starbucks case for example, what would be a compelling reason to visit the Starbucks corporate website? Compare this with the company’s facebook page. 600 million users, many of them presumably Starbucks customers, are already on facebook’s site. If Starbucks wants to connect with those users, they need to be there too.

The article goes on to point out the benefits to businesses of each method of online marketing, social media and your own website.

Benefits of Social Media

1. Inherently interactive.
2. Where people are spending time.
3. Easy to acquire users / fans.
4. Virality.

Benefits of Your Own Website

1. Control the design.
2. Own the data.
3. Targeting and personalization.
4. Reach all your audience.

Does your company have a facebook fan page? If you would like one, check out my web design company, Power Play Marketing and our social media marketing packages.

Here is a link to the complete article on bnet.com, Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website?

Website Traffic Tips: Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a great place to generate traffic to your sites, because no matter what niche or topic your website is about, there are probably people asking questions about it. If you can answer them effectively, it will help you get both direct traffic and long-term backlinks to your website. Let’s look at how to use it effectively.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to provide some value. It’s a give-and-take situation – you’re giving useful information and in turn you’re “taking” traffic and backlinks.

If you approach it from a purely selfish point of view, it’s not going to work as well, and chances are your Yahoo Answers account will get suspended sooner or later (probably sooner!)

That means that you’re not going to include a link to your website in every single answer you post. You might include a link to other sites in some answers, or no link at all in others. You want your account to grow naturally. In other words, if someone from Yahoo was to review your answers, you don’t want every single one of them pointing back to your own website.

The most effective way to use Yahoo Answers is to spend some time on it every day. Search for questions in your market and find some that you can answer. Ideally, find the newest ones so you can be the first, or close to the first person to respond. The higher you are in the list of responses, the more traffic you’re going to get.

And ultimately, you want to have as many of your answers as possible chosen as the “best answer” because it will be shown right underneath the question from that point on.

When you answer a question today, if it’s chosen as the best one, it could generate traffic to your site for years to come.

When you answer a question, there’s a spot where you can enter a link to a website that provides more information about it. That is where you can include a link to your own site in some of the answers – not in the answer itself.

One good way to approach this is when you find a relevant question that you don’t already cover on your site, write a new blog post or article explaining the answer in some detail. Then provide a shorter summary on Yahoo Answers with a link to your new article.

This kills two birds with one stone – coming up with ideas for new content on your site and answering questions on Yahoo.

Website Traffic Tips: Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

Pay Per Click, also known as PPC, is one of the fastest ways to generate traffic to your website. The downside, of course, is that it will cost you money so you’ll need to be sure you either have some money to invest up front, or a way to make money from those visitors to cover the cost of your ads. Let’s look at how you can use pay per click marketing most effectively.

There are quite a few PPC sites, but the most widely used are Google Adwords and Yahoo/Bing adCenter. Facebook advertising is also growing quite fast so it’s another option to consider.

As a general rule, Adwords will be the most expensive place to run your ads, because they are the largest. That means there are more people competing for the ad space, driving up the costs. Yahoo/Bing is less expensive in most cases, but it will depend on the market you’re in to some degree.

Adwords also has some fairly strict policies, so you’ll need to be sure that you’re offering some real value to the people who click on your ads, and that your website meets all of Google terms of service.

One of the most important things about pay per click marketing is to be sure you’re targeting effective keywords in your ads. Generally, the more specific your keywords are, the better. And ultimately you want to find “buying” keywords – the ones that are used by people who are actively looking to buy something.

If you target your ads at general keywords for your market, it can generate a lot more traffic, but a lot of those people are just looking for information – they’re not necessarily going to convert into paying customers. While getting a lot of traffic sounds good in theory, it isn’t good if it just costs you a lot of money with no significant returns.

Another important factor for success with PPC marketing is good tracking. If you’re getting visitors from several sources, say articles that you’ve submitted, the search engines and Adwords, you need to know which of those visitors are generating revenue for you.

If the paid ads don’t generate enough to cover the cost, you’re losing money on them – even if the site is profitable overall. By tracking the different traffic sources through to the final conversions, you’ll know exactly where the money is being made.

There are a lot of horror stories about people losing a lot of money on PPC advertising. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you definitely need to make sure you understand how it works, what your risks are, and how to target the right people before you start spending any money.

Generate Free Website Traffic With SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most widely-used traffic generation methods. Because the traffic is free, many people prefer it to paid advertising like pay-per-click or banner ads. Let’s look at some of the ways to increase your traffic through SEO.

It should be mentioned that SEO is an element of search engine marketing, also known as SEM. SEM is an umbrella term for lots of specific techniques including:

• Article marketing
• Linkwheels
• Social bookmarking
• Video marketing

All of these methods (and a number of others) will help to improve your SEO results, and you should be using multiple techniques on your sites.

There are two aspects of marketing websites – onsite and offsite optimization.

Onsite factors include things like using your keywords in appropriate places such as the HTML title tag, the content itself and links to different articles or categories on your site. Basically, all the things that you can do to your own site to help the search engines understand what it’s about, and send visitors to it when they search for related things.

Offsite factors, on the other hand, are things like backlinks, length of visit and so on – the things that you don’t have direct control over.

For the best results, you need to focus on both aspects – on- and off-site.

There are a ton of onsite techniques that people use, with varying degrees of importance. Let’s just look at a couple of the most important ones.

First, the HTML title tag. You want to make sure you use the primary keyword for the page in your title tag, as well as add some related keywords – also known as LSI keywords.

But don’t just stuff it with keywords. Make it clear what the reader will get when they visit the page. Most of the search engines use the page’s title tag as the headline in their search results, so you want it to grab people’s attention and get them to click on it.

The second important onsite SEO factor is using your keywords in your content. This can be a double-edged sword, mind you. If you overuse your keywords on the page (also known as keyword stuffing) it can make it harder to read, and may even affect your ranking negatively.

Instead, sprinkle your main keyword and some different variations of it throughout your content. And make sure you use some related keywords as well, so the search engines can “understand” what the page is really about.

As for offsite optimization, the biggest factor here is backlinks. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, from a range of different websites – and the more authority those sites have themselves – the higher your site is going to rank in the search engines.

If you set your pages up right in the first place, your onsite SEO really doesn’t need much maintenance. So you’ll want to spend the bulk of your time working on the offsite SEO. Put in some time and effort, and it will pay off in the long term.

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